How much does a game’s ending impact its replay value? How much should a games’s ending impact its replay value? Before, my answers to these questions would hve been more or less the same: “heavily.” After all, the ending is the culmination of all your efforts in a game, right? If it doesn’t go well, then it’ll sour everything that came before, won’t it? After finishing Baldur’s Gate 3 though, I’m not so sure anymore. Maybe, for some games, the journey itself is good enough. May the ending isn’t so universally important after all.

I guess I’ll just come out and say it: I don’t like how Baldur’s Gate 3 ends. I don’t like it one bit. The sequence leading up to the final fight was overly long and felt hard for the sake of being hard. Certainly a game’s ending should include some ofits greatest challenges, but there’s a difference between a well-designed encounter and just doing stuff like infinitely spawning dudes and constantly refreshing extremely damaging environmental hazards.

The final fight itself suffers from similar issues, where it presents the player with many extremely strong enemies while simultaneously pushing them to rush the fight as much as possible. Basically, the end sequence punishes the slow and careful approach that the rest of the game’s runtime strongly encourages. You either gotta cheese it in some cheeky way or exploit class builds in order to blow everything away. All this is to say that it’s just not fun if you have just been playing the game normally up to that point.

As for the ending itself, I have two issues. The first is that it forces a decision that doesn’t really make any sense if you spend any time at all thinking about it. It also feels like the game lied to you. It’s kind of an out of nowhere shift that flies in the face of what we were led to believe up to that point. This was surely done to add dramatic weight to the proceedings, but the way its executed leaves the player more confused and annoyed than anything else.

The other issue is that we don’t get a nice wrap up for everything. There’s no epilogue showing you the results of your choices, no chance to say goodbye to your party members (and no epilogue for them either), and only a very brief scene with your character’s love interest that’s just a recap of one of the standard camp conversations. In other words, it feels altogether too short, as if a ton ofit got cut out.

To say I was disappointed would be a bit of an understatement. I felt robbed of the “proper” ending that I’d earned and wondered what the point of all those decisions I’d made even was. Sure, everything worked out in the end, but not as the sum total of my decisions as the game had led me to believe it would. In a few ways, it was the same kind of disappointment that Mass Effect 3’s ending brought on (though thankfully not as intensely), and I’ve never been able to go back to that game. All that said though, I don’t think the same fate will befall Baldur’s Gate 3.

After I finally cooled down again, I thought back to everything I’d done up to that point and found that I still enjoyed playing through it all. I also re-examined the aftermath of some of the major sidequests and realized that there was some indication of what would happen moving forward. It was always just what would immediately happen next, but it was something at least. The actual encounters and scenarios had been fun too, and there were still a lot of different approaches to try.

As limiting as Baldur’s Gate 3 is with its ending, it’s possibly one of the most open games out there when it comes to everything leading up to it. The game is able to account for so many off-the-wall decisions and happenings that it almost never fails to impress. There’s already a host of thigns I’d like to try in a second playthrough sometime down the line. Even so, the fact that I won’t get the kind of closure I was hoping for for any of it is still kind of a downer. Perhaps it’ll just be a matter of skipping the ending and filling in the blanks with head-canon or fan creations. At the very least, Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t completely ruined.

In many cases, I still think a game’s ending can and should make or break it. With story-driven games or those with a lot of supposedly weighty decisions, I think they really do need to feel worthwhile in the end. The ending doesn’t need to be happy, but it must acknowledge what came before. It also shouldn’t pull stuff out of thin air just for some extra dramatic kick.

I now realize though that there are games whose journeys are strong enough to overcome a disappointing ending. If its characters, scenarios and experiences are strong enough (and sufficiently separate from the ending), then enjoying a replay is still very possible. It’s just a matter of players applying a little more of their own creative license, I think.

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What do you think about game endings? Should they be given as much weight they currently get, or sohuld we try harder to separate them from the rest of their games?

Image from the Baldur’s Gate 3 Steam page